Research:

I work on simulations of galactic disk truncation with Tom Quinn and Victor Debattista at UW. Click on the link for some mind-blowing movies.

Computing:

• (super)Computing:

  One day I had an idea to buy a supercomputer. Partly because the above-mentioned 10 Gflops are definitely not enough. So we (Greg, Nate and myself on behalf of the astro grads) got $100k from the Student Tech Fee and another $20k or so from a collaborating professor's grant and bought robert. He's nice. He has 104 compute cpus, each produces about 2 Gflops. Currently, it appears that robert is the most powerful single compute resource in the astronomy & physics building.

  Even if robert is nice, he's just too small sometimes - I also use the resources on the TeraGrid regurarly for larger simulations, like this (largest ever?) 10-million particle simulation of an isolated galaxy

• Distributed Computing (Condor):

  Our department has a Condor distributed computing system in place. I've recently, with the help of Tom Quinn, set it up so it is possible to run parallel MPI code on this same system. It is configured to run on the 18 computers connected with Gigabit ethernet. Using pkdgrav, I can get about 10 Gflops out of it, which isn't bad. It's not bad at all, when you consider that these are flops which would otherwise go unused - they are perfectly sufficient to run some moderately-sized simulations.

  Look at the Condor-MPI page to get information on how you can also run your pkdgrav/gasoline or any other mpi code in parallel through Condor.

  If you are unfamiliar with Condor, you should have a look at the Condor tutorial page set up by Greg, Peter, and others...